Koniya Sign, or Amami Oshima Sign (AOSL), is a
village sign language A village sign language, or village sign, also known as a shared sign language, is a local indigenous sign language used by both deaf and hearing in an area with a high incidence of congenital deafness. Meir ''et al.'' define a village sign languag ...
, or group of languages, on
Amami Ōshima, the largest island in the
Amami Islands of
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
. In the region of on the island, there exist a high incidence of congenital deafness, which is dominant and tends to run in a few families; moreover, the difficulty of the terrain has kept these families largely separated, so that there is extreme lexical geographical diversity across the island, and AOSL is therefore perhaps not a single language.
See also
*
Ted Supalla
Ted Supalla is a deaf linguist whose research centers on sign language in its developmental and global context, including studies of the grammatical structure and evolution of American Sign Language and other sign languages.
Previously at the Uni ...
*
Japanese Sign Language
*
Miyakubo Sign Language
Miyakubo Sign Language, also known as Ehime-Oshima Sign Language, is a village sign language of Ōshima Island in the western Inland Sea of Japan. In the town of Miyakubo on the island, there exist a high incidence of congenital deafness. Thre ...
Bibliography
*Osugi, Yutaka; Ted Supalla; and Rebecca Webb (1999). "The use of word elicitation to identify distinctive gestural systems on Amami Island." ''Sign Language & Linguistics'', 2:1:87–112
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Village sign languages
Sign languages of Japan
Amami culture